Dead Space Extraction

A lot of games claim to be scary, but are they really? In the spirit of Halloween, I played three horror games in the middle of the night. I shut off the lights and recorded myself playing. What I discovered is that I cuss a lot when I’m scared and that some games are surprisingly more frightening than others.

Saw: The Video Game: I wasn’t expecting to enjoy this game as much as I did. You play as Detective David Tapp, who is trapped inside an insane asylum with a few other victims playing Jigsaw’s game. I was pretty horrified by some of the things I saw, but what freaked me out the most is some of the things Tapp is forced to do like digging inside people’s bodies for keys to open doors. Scary Rating: Four Screams out of Five.

Ju-on: The Grudge: When I first played this game a few weeks back, I wasn’t really impressed. The game seemed too slow and too simple for my tastes. As different characters in the Yamada family, you walk around in the dark finding keys for locked doors and extra batteries to power your flashlights. Occasionally, there are some legitimate scares, but most of the time the game is rather boring as you fumble about the dark. Scary Rating: Two Screams out of Five.

Dead Space: Extraction: It takes a long time to get into this horror sequel. Unlike the original, this Wii game is a rail shooter with a few extra layers of gameplay such as branching paths. For some reason — maybe it’s the graphics or perhaps it’s because of the format — I never felt legitimately scared. Extraction does a good job horrifying you with cannabalism, monstrous creatures and the body count, but because you have guns and your shooting things left and right, I never felt vulnerable. All things considred though, I have to say that it’s definitely more entertaining than The Grudge though. Scary Rating: Four Screams out of Five.

Say what you will about Electronic Arts but I’ve liked the direction that they’ve been going in the past couple of months. The emphasis on more original titles and less on movie and sequelized games was refreshing.

The best game to come out of this new approach has to be Dead Space. It was definitely the most polished survival-horror game that I’ve played in a while, and I’m glad that the Redwood City-based company is coming out with another chapter in the franchise with the Wii.
Dead Space Extraction will be a prequel of sorts that ” reveals the events leading up to Isaac Clarke’s mission on the USG Ishimura.” If it controls like Resident Evil 4 for the Wii, then we could be looking at a hell of game.